Creativity is to do with having fresh, divergent responses and ideas. When developing creativity with children, you need to:

• • provide a stimulus such as a question, image, story, object or problem;

• • be sure that children are emotionally engaged and motivated to achieve a particular creative outcome;

• • give children an opportunity to play with ideas freely and spontaneously without judging their contributions;

• • provide a clear framework and model or build up an example of a creative outcome with the whole class first;

• • teach the necessary language, skills and strategies to achieve a creative goal;

• • give constructive feedback and praise which focus on children's effort and develop a growth mindset (see 32).

As well as developing children's creativity, you can also enhance your teaching if you think about your own creativity. This means using varied, imaginative approaches to make your lessons more engaging and effective. Although this involves an element of risk-taking, you’re likely to be rewarded by children's positive response, as well as expanding your own repertoire of teaching ideas.

My key tips for creativity are:

• 73 Be creative in small ways

• 74 Explore and play with ideas

• 75 Provide a stimulus, a framework and a purpose

• 76 Think about what you usually do – and do something different!

73 Be creative in small ways

When you model creativity in small ways on a regular basis, you establish a learning environment in which new or different ideas are valued. You also motivate children to think flexibly and be creative too. Some examples are:

• • Lining up: by asking children to line up by age, height or month of their birthday, you give this routine activity a learning purpose and make it enjoyable. Once children have got the idea, they are likely to suggest others, e.g. lining up by colour of clothes or alphabetical order of names.

• • Taking the register: turn this into a word association game, e.g.Teacher: Rachid – Cinema! / Rachid: Film!, or geography lesson by pre-assigning a country to each child and when you name this, they say the capital, e.g. Morocco! / Rabat! As with lining up, children are likely to suggest other ideas too, e.g. pre-assigning animals and naming the young or making the sound, e.g. Lion! / Cub! (or Roar!)